Monday, September 27, 2010

Ryan Thomas Becker - 27 Sep. 2010 - Opening Bell

It had been a long day, one of those days you feel embarrassed to be calling long. After all, what right do any of us have to be calling those hours of sitting and typing and pensiveness anything that resembles labor. But it is our ill habit, in this age, to feel the inexplicable, psychic drag of some days.

It was just that sort of day when I walked into Opening Bell at Southside still wearing my interview clothes, feeling odd in tie and dress shoes. And it may seem hackneyed to say so, but I felt my gloomy, urban anxiety go slack when Ryan Thomas Becker hummed his first note.

The curative power of music: an oft-repeated idea to make it nearly insipid. But there it stands like a faithful truth, like restful Sundays or the sleep of deep night, steadfastly routine. A proper tune arrives just as timely, a word said perfectly, a few notes down and up in a particular order to make the nerves smooth again.

A lot of music is just perfect, very on-the-nose. Ryan Thomas Becker is not. His music is beyond conceivability, so much that an idea like "perfect" can't really precede it. Most people, I think, believe in something at the bottom of their living, beyond the obvious, and in their inability to get at it. Everybody wants to crawl between the molecules and pull the universe over themselves like bedcovers. Ryan Thomas Becker helps us prospect in that direction.

One man with a worn voice and an acoustic guitar on an otherwise innocuous, overwrought Monday, and suddenly I'm ok.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Dick, that was a great piece. I dont even need to go to shows anymore---you make me feel like im there.
-danny

Dick Sullivan said...

I'm going to shave your eyebrows while you sleep, Danny.